Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) went after Newt Gingrich Wednesday for calling President Obama the "food stamp president." Gutierrez ran through a series of charts about food stamps, showing the rising cost of the program, and the increase in the number of people on the program.

Armed with facts, the Congressman has a little fun setting the record straight.

Can you guess which president owns the first chart, about the increase in people who get food stamps, and which president owns the second one, about the rising cost of the program.

I'm not going to tell you the answers, but I will give you two hints. There is a father and son in the answers, and neither is named Barack Obama.

Congressman Gutierrez closes his presentation with some eloquent words on hunger:

And here's another fact for Newt Gingrich, just in case his "food stamp president" name-calling was designed to make a political point that he wasn't quite so willing to come right out and say:

Of recipients whose race we know, 22 percent of SNAP recipients are African-American. And 34 percent are white. Because hunger knows no race, or religion, or age or political party. Hunger is color-blind.

So today I say thank you to President Obama.

From now on, my nickname for you, President Obama, is "The 'In America, kids shouldn’t be hungry' President."

I am a big foodie. My husband and I will spend weekends planning meals, research restaurants we want to try, organize vacations around types of food we want to have, know chefs by face like celebrities (yes, we're dorks). I'm trying to raise our kids not only with an open mind to try new foods but to be very conscious of the foods they're eating. Ironically, it was the satire site "Food Network Humor" that called my attention to a show that to my knowledge, got very little advertising, even on its own network. But this show has raised my consciousness to another area of food and hunger that we all must be more cognizant: waste.

The theme of the show The Big Waste was to ask two sets of Food Network chefs to prepare a meal with ingredients that were considered waste. I'm not talking about green bologna sandwiches. Even these chefs, with decades of experience in the restaurant industry, were genuinely shocked by the sheer volume of perfectly good foods that are thrown away daily. In an age where one in four children go to bed hungry, it's hard not to be shocked at the routine waste that could answer so many needs.

Enormous food waste is the result of the old way of thinking about the agricultural economic model.

• When food prices fall below expectations or are driven lower by “Big Ag”, small farmers see themselves as having no choice but to waste tons of perfectly good food because the cost of bringing that food to market would generate an economic loss.
• As seen on "The Big Waste", grocery stores routinely throw away tons of perfectly good produce and meats due to small imperfections in appearance. Some store chains such as Whole Foods takes some of this excess product and gives it to local food pantries, but most of it ends up in landfills and compost heaps.
• Many distributors of food products routinely waste hundreds of tons of food product as a means of price control and profit protection. When these distributors find themselves with excess product with a low shelf life, they would prefer to throw it in the garbage than to sell it at a discount in order to protect the original price of the product.

One of the segments of The Big Waste involved chef Bobby Flay going to a pick-your-own farm and discovering that waste accounts for 40-50% of the crops, because too often, customers will cut produce and then see some small imperfection, or a better/larger example of the produce and toss the rejected produce back on the ground. A small grocery in NYC acknowledged that they routinely throw out around eighty pounds of produce daily because they know customers won't select the produce with cosmetic imperfections, broken stems, etc. Eggs are thrown away because of discoloring on the shells, or that they're too large or small for egg containers. Whole chickens are discarded because the skin breaks or bones are broken during the butchering process. All told, some 27 million tons of perfectly edible food is thrown away every year.

I've searched through the Food Network site in vain to find when the show will re-air. Unfortunately and quite inexplicably, Food Network is not promoting this show at all. I can't find clips on Hulu or YouTube either. But please, if you want an eye-opening experience, find this show. And the next time you're in the grocery store, don't be afraid of a little blemish. If more people paid less attention to cosmetic appearances and more to nutritional content, it would be better for all. CookingMatters offers ten additional tips to help individuals waste less food.

Consider the irony of this very portly man whose bluster is greater than his brain ranting about poor children, especially at this time of year. Consider further the utter meanness of what he says, particularly in terms of the conservative penchant for demanding that women give birth to their children whether they choose to or not.

As cliché as it sounds, Limbaugh makes Scrooge almost a cuddly sweetheart. Still, it highlights better than anything else I could possibly imagine the utter contempt conservatives have for children after they have left the embryo stage and entered the world we all live in.

To listen to Limbaugh, you would think children were born with a deeply-held ardent desire to become little sluggards, feeding three times a day on the State while plotting their takeover of free meals in the summer. And according to Rush, it turns them into "wanton waifs and serfs depending on the State. Pure and simple."

Not so simple, but simple-minded Rush listeners will certainly think so. This is why Newt Gingrich is permitted to get away with his evil mantra about children cleaning bathrooms so janitors can all be fired. When Newt says it, he sounds just a tiny bit more benign than Rush, but not much.

In what is possibly the weirdest part of this whole rant, Rushbo shakes his fist at school meal programs during the school year, because that leaves children with no way to get food during the summer. Of course, the summer food assistance programs are what Rush is ranting about in the first place, so it's really nothing more than an excuse to rant about bratty little kids getting food from the government so they can be lazy bums who turn into "wanton waifs and serfs." I suppose his alternative is for them to simply starve after they have left the embryo state?

This, from a guy who sucks on the corporate welfare teat of Clear Channel Networks to the tune of $50 million per year. Who exactly is the lazy bum? For perspective, read this article about poverty in Columbia, MO, and how teachers are coping with it.

Full transcript follows (with some scattered commentary) if you can't bear to listen to his self-satisfied sanctimonious voice.

Continue reading »

I was the approximate age demographic when Sesame Street debuted in 1969. But I wasn't the target audience. Sesame Street was created to assist children--particularly from low-income families--with basic letter recognition and other cognitive skills before they entered kindergarten. Over the intervening 40 plus years, Sesame Street has modified its initial mission statement to introduce the concepts of tolerance, social diversity, conflict resolution and handled some really big picture ideas like the death of a loved one, coming back after natural disasters, marriages, births, adoptions and even September 11th.

This year, the good people of the Sesame Workshop have decided that they need to address another issue affecting Americans: food insecurity.

The iconic kids show is set to unveil a new impoverished puppet named Lily, whose family faces an ongoing struggle with hunger issues. Lily will be revealed in a one-hour Sesame Street primetime special, Growing Hope Against Hunger, which is being sponsored by Walmart. The special will star country singer Brad Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams Paisley, as well as the Sesame Street Muppets.

“Food insecurity is a growing and difficult issue for adults to discuss, much less children,” said the Paisleys in a statement. “We are honored that Sesame Street, with its long history of tackling difficult issues with sensitivity, caring and warmth asked us to be a part of this important project.” The special will share the stories of real-life families to raise awareness of hunger issues in the United States, as well as strategies that have helped these families find food. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 17 million American children — nearly 1 in 4 — have limited or uncertain access to affordable and nutritious food.

Let me repeat this: ONE IN FOUR CHILDREN are hungry. This is not some third-world, banana republic nation. This is not some resource- and agriculturally-poor country dependent upon foreign aid. This is the wealthiest nation in the world. This is unacceptable.

Poor nutrition has been linked to a vast array of health and cognitive issues, which can then be linked to a host of societal ills, the circle of poverty, neglect, crime and punishment continuing generation after generation.

The wealthiest country in the world.

Unacceptable.

If you want to help, FeedingAmerica.org has ideas on what you can do.

Oh, it does my heart good to watch Baby Paul schooled in such a direct fashion. This little "debate" on food programs for seniors highlights the Randian "screw you, I've got mine" attitude so well. This video is from a Senate hearing on the Older Americans Act. Here are some highlights:

FRANKEN: Make no mistake, the Older Americans Act saves money. It allows seniors to stay in their homes, who wouldn't otherwise be able to stay in their homes.

PAUL: It's curious that only in Washington DC can you spend two billion dollars and claim that you're saving money. Here's a thought. Perhaps the two billion dollars we spend on OAA, if we subsumed that into another program and didn't spend it, that might be saving money.

So, let me see if I have this right. Baby Paul is saying that by merging OAA with another program but not funding it, there would be savings to the government. Yes, that's what he's saying. Sanders and Franken have an answer for him.

SANDERS: Senator Paul has suggested that only in Washington can people believe that spending money actually saves money. And I think that is the kind of philosophy which results in us spending almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country on earth, because we have millions and millions of Americans who can't get to a doctor on time. Some of them die, some of them become very, very ill. They end up in the emergency room, they end up in the hospital at great cost rather than making sure they have access to a doctor. Maybe it's the same reason why we have more people in jail than any other country on earth including China, tied to the fact that we have the highest poverty rate among children than any other major country on earth.

So the point is, and I think we have a bit of a difference here, I believe -- I think Senator Franken has spoken to the fact -- that prevention, keeping people healthy, taking care of their needs at home does actually save money. And that if you deny those resources, if you leave a senior citizen home today, alone, isolated, confused about medicine, not getting the nutrition they need, you know what happens to that person? That person collapses, that person ends up in an emergency room, that person ends up in a nursing home, at much greater cost to the system.

FRANKEN: Here's my very precise question. Does the Older Americans Act save taxpayers money by allowing seniors to stay in their homes as opposed to going to nursing homes?

MS. GREENLEE: Yes, Senator.

FRANKEN: Thank you.

SANDERS: Senator Paul wanted to make another comment.

PAUL: I appreciate the great and I think very collegial discussion, and we do have different opinions. Some of us believe more in the ability of government to cure problems and some of us believe more in the ability of private charity to cure these problems. I guess what I still find curious though is that if we are saving money with the two billion dollars we spend, perhaps we should give you 20 billion. Is there a limit? Where would we get to, how much money should we give you to save money? So if we spend federal money to save money where is the limit? I think we could reach a point of absurdity. Thank you.

FRANKEN: I think you just did.

Continue reading »

Rush Limbaugh's ongoing assault on family values continues.

This ugly excuse for a human being actually went on the radio and went off on hungry children in the US. Whether he likes it or not, hunger becomes a real problem when children don't have even a school lunch because many children rely upon the federal school lunch program to get their one decent meal a day.

Here's what Limbaugh said:

God, this is just -- we can't escape these people. We just can't escape them. They live in the utter deniability of basic human nature. They actually have it in their heads somehow that parents are so rotten that they will let their kids go hungry and starve, unless the schools take care of it

Sometimes it's not a question of "let". Sometimes it just "IS".

There's more:

I think, you know what we're going to do here, we're going to start a feature on this program: "Where to find food." For young demographics, where to find food. Now that school is out, where to find food. We can have a daily feature on this. And this will take us all the way through the summer. Where to find food. And, of course, the first will be: "Try your house." It's a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what's called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you're going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don't want, but it will be there. If that doesn't work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald's. You know where McDonald's is. There's the Dollar Menu at McDonald's and if they don't have Chicken McNuggets, dial 911 and ask for Obama.

There's another place if none of these options work to find food; there's always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August. Can you imagine the benefit we would provide people?

The idea of this fat bastard SOB ridiculing hungry children by telling them if they just look in the kitchen cupboards they'll find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips and all kinds of dip just makes me sick. It makes me want to deface his pudgy ugly picture.

Let's look at what it's like to be a child whose only reliable meal is a hot lunch. This was written by a friend of mine. I keep it bookmarked and read it weekly to remind myself to have gratitude that my children aren't hungry, aren't cold, have a home and their basic needs met.

Continue reading »

Living in poverty is a very complicated enterprise that requires vast amounts of emotional energy, time and money. You pay a "food tax" if there are no supermarkets in your neighborhood, because corner stores are more expensive. You pay additional fees to have electricity or the phone turned back on because you couldn't pay the bill on time, and you're at higher risk of losing your job because you have so little control of your environment and anything could happen at any time to keep you from getting to work.

This Washington Post article is one of the few I've seen that does a really good job of separating the strands:

Anajyha, a serious girl with two younger brothers and a mother who has lost two of her three part-time jobs, is growing up with an ebb and flow of food typical of a growing number of families. In her home, in a scuffed neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion a few miles north of the Liberty Bell, food stamps arrive but never last the month. There can be cereal but no milk. Pancake mix and butter but no eggs.

The intricacy of the problem -- and of the Obama administration's task -- plays out here, where Anajyha could have enough to eat but shortchanges herself.

Philadelphia offers a particularly vivid ground-level view of what researchers call a "silent epidemic" of hungry and undernourished youngsters. For years, local civic activists, health experts and politicians have tried some of the nation's most innovative experiments -- and learned how intractable hunger can be. Researchers here have also been at the leading edge in trying to fathom the effects of a scarcity of food.

Even when children are not hungry, studies have found that slight shortages of food in their homes are associated with serious problems. Babies and toddlers in those homes are far more likely to be hospitalized than children in families with similar incomes but adequate food. School-age children tend to learn and grow more slowly, and to get into trouble more often. Teenage girls are more prone to be depressed or even flirt with thoughts of suicide.

Solving the problem is further complicated by its subtle nature. "Most people who are hungry are not clinically manifesting what we consider hunger. It doesn't even affect body weight," said Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University medical anthropologist who is part of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public health researchers in Philadelphia and four other cities. Hunger cannot be solved by food alone, their work shows, because it is one strand in a web of pressures that trap families, including housing and energy costs.

This more nuanced picture is emerging as the problem has become more widespread. With the economy faltering, the number of youngsters living in homes without enough food soared in 2008 from 13 million to nearly 17 million, the Agriculture Department reported last month.

In Philadelphia, researchers found that, during the first half of this year, one in five homes with a baby or toddler did not have enough food. And one of every dozen young children was outright hungry, a rate twice that of the same period the year before.

I can just hear Rush Limbaugh now: "If they're so hungry, how did they get so fat?" And our side's not much better, because of course they're going to agree with the Republicans that the best way to handle the problem is with tax cuts and deficit reduction.

I think I need to bang my head against a wall now:

The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.

At a time when rising poverty, widespread unemployment and other effects of the recession have been well documented, the report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides the government's first detailed portrait of the toll that the faltering economy has taken on Americans' access to food.

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling."

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

I thought this was the most important finding:

The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work.

Wow, it's going down to the wire with many NO votes...207-226 right now.

The Market is tanking badly too...And Newt Gingrich issues a statement that I heard on MSNBC which says he would reluctantly vote for it...Hmmm....

UPDATE: It failed....No one trusts Bush and McCain did nothing....

This mess shows that Conservatism is a failure. I know we are dismayed by our politicians, but don't forget that under conservative leadership, we've had the total collapse of our financial sector and we can never stop saying that.

And if the media tries to portray Republicans as hero figures I'll start my own drinking game.

Crying Boehner is saying it's Pelosi's fault because she gave a partisan speech. What jokers. A speech made them vote against it. They are saying it is not a partisan crisis, but an economic one. Sure---that was caused by Republican/McCain hunger for deregulation.

Will McCain suspend his campaign again and try to cancel Palin's debate?

There you go...The Aqua Teen hunger Force caused havoc in Boston...I happen to like Robot Chicken.

Turner's Statement:

The "packages" in question are magnetic lights that pose no danger. They are part of an outdoor marketing campaign in 10 cities in support of Adult Swim's animated television show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They have been in place for two to three weeks in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Parent company Turner Broadcasting is in contact with local and federal law enforcement on the exact locations of the billboards.

We regret that they were mistakenly thought to pose any danger.

Update: Here's the story